Now you can develop your newly acquired skills further with the 2nd module in the sequence, 6.0002 Introduction to Computational Thinking and Data Science. It picks up where 6.0001 left off, providing you with “an understanding of the role computation can play in solving problems and to help students, regardless of their major, feel justifiably confident of their ability to write small programs that allow them to accomplish useful goals.”

The OCW site has full video lectures, featuring Professors John Guttag and Eric Grimson, along with lecture slides and supporting code, problem sets (so you can try out what you’ve learned), and files to install the latest version of Python, version 3.5.

One of the great strengths of OCW as an educational resource is its extensive list of course sites from MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. You might think, with so many courses published from the EECS curriculum, that OCW’s work for this department has reached a plateau.

But OCW continues to climb higher, augmenting and refreshing the course list, and two new publications present superb cases in point.

Students who have developed some programming skill might then move on to 6.005 Software Construction, as taught in Spring 2016 by Professor Rob Miller and Dr. Max Goldman. As the instructors say in the syllabus, the course “introduces fundamental principles and techniques of software development, i.e., how to write software that is safe from bugs, easy to understand, and ready for change.”

“Graphs—what are they good for? Poetry!” A page section from the problem, “Poetic Walks,” in the 6.005 Assignments.

An advocate of active learning, Professor Miller has his MIT students read a carefully structured textbook before coming to class so that most time can be spent doing exercises. The OCW site includes the full set of class readings, along with problems sets and a project, the ABC Music Player.